Vac

by Paul Ableman

  So now we don’t live together.

  Well, that’s normal. A meeting exacts a parting. No one can live together for ever. I explained that to you in the old days. I said that we’d die sometime. I pointed out that you would die or I would have to die and then we would no longer be together. You didn’t believe it. I’d often tried to rid you of naive ideas about an afterlife but you still could not imaginatively conceive a universe in which we were no longer together. I expostulated:

  — We’re like leaves. When a leaf falls its soul doesn’t go on existing somewhere. It’s made its contribution to life and it’s finished. Life is like an electric current. When a current is switched off it doesn’t go on in another form. It simply stops.

  — You won’t escape me, Billy.

  — I don’t want to. But we will die. The atoms—the atoms of my body—in a thousand years may be completely dispersed. I may be just—just a tiny speck of dung floating through distant space.

  — Then I’ll be another speck of dung floating beside you.

  And then I had to hug you—hug you, press you, squeeze you against me in an agony of need to confirm your exquisite trust in the inviolability of our union and merge you with my flesh for ever. But, of course, I retained my certainty that death must part us—little suspecting that I would one day anticipate its function myself—and I found the notion gravely disturbing. I tried to find comfort in romantic metaphysics:

  — You and I, as we are, with our names and personalities, will have to part one day. But there’s a sense in which we’ll always be together. Wherever there are two people who feel about each other as we do, why those two will be us.

  And now we don’t live together.

  My fault! My fault! Selfish, self-indulgent, greedy, spoiled, immature—I’ll take the blame!

  And yet how can I?

  It would be unworthy of the power and integrity of what we had to suppose its failure could be clarified by a simple assignation of responsibility. Selfish, self-indulgent and the rest I probably am but potent enough to regulate all the forces acting on our lives I could never have been. It would be a libel on your boundless vitality, in which I bathed so exultantly for so long, to explain our separation exclusively in terms of my own squalid failings.

  I stand at the window.

  Across the street to the left, through the smaller side pane, I see trees. They are in one of the gardens behind the houses opposite and a clump of them is visible through a broad gap in the buildings. They are poplars, very green and tall. The powerful wind blows but the pliant trees seem to move of their own volition. They arch over and rake at the earth with great green claws. They are never still. They sway upright again and then once more sweep forward to scrape at the ground. The illusion of independent activity is intense. The trees are maenads, raging at their tether, raging at the cage of bricks in which omnipotent man has imprisoned them. Shiny cars, moving with smooth, linear precision, glide beneath the furious dance of the trees.

  No, we no longer live together.

  Although we are not spatially far apart. You are just there, in a house I know well.

  The wall-length window of my narrow room was pasted with broad strips of paper when the ack-ack guns thumped on the heath. I lay in bed, alarmed at the closeness of that sweep of glass. I had read in the paper that a shard of flying glass had decapitated a sleeping man. The glass controlled the room. There was no sheltering angle of wall which would protect one from being raked by flying glass. I lay in bed, hoping sleep would soon insulate me from the raucous sound of the flying bomb that might even then be spurting over English fields to shatter my body.

  I turn from the window.

  The dance of the trees has ignited a torch of nostalgia. Childhood scenes glow in my mind. I can almost feel the spines of the horse-chestnuts heaped in my lap, and upon which I gloat, as the car slides through an endless forest. Again, a field of buttercups shines with magical radiance. Again, I and another boy walk under pleasant, scattered trees over a lawn to a boat moored at a small jetty. We row away into a maze of tidal canals and fish for crabs. Our delight in wind, sun, water and our own health is flawless. In a Sussex lane I snap off the slick, pale-green bulbs of poppies and tear them apart to gaze at the packed white seeds. In the same lane, in winter, I probe with my toe at the film of ice on a puddle and hear it crack with a tinkling sound. I pick up a thin, jagged sheet of scored ice. The world is an ecstasy of detail.

  A child’s rapture is the polar opposite of a mystic’s. Like all opposites the two can be defined by common middle terms. The child is entering the world of experience, the mystic emerging from it. Wonder and reverence characterize both the virgin mating of the child with experience and the adult mystic’s apprehension of unity in cosmic process. Wonder and reverence are the terminals across which the transfiguring spark of joy discharges. Joy is thus the property of children and mystics and anyone experiencing joy is momentarily a child or a mystic.

  They share a sense of strangeness. For the child the earth is unknown and thus magical. For the mystic it is never vulgarized into a mere theatre of events but remains a radiant sphere suspended in creative mystery. The ultimate credo of the child, had he the sophistication to formulate it, would be the same as that of the mystic: the universe is more like a poem than an equation.

  I enter the house with the door-key I have always retained. I see my aunt at the end of the corridor, in the little kitchen, at work before the stove. I smell roasting meat. I close the door quietly behind me, rather hoping she won’t hear. I would prefer to slip straight into my mother’s room and pour myself a drink.

  However, she does hear. She leans backwards to gaze along the dark corridor. Her eyes, accustomed to the brightness of the kitchen, cannot distinguish me, although the sound of my approaching footsteps implies my identity since one of the lodgers would most likely have gone straight upstairs to his or her room.

  — Willy?

  — Hello, Anny.

  — How are you, dear?

  — Tolerable. Barely tolerable. Lucy here yet?

  — No, not yet.

  She senses that my hand is on the door-handle giving access to my mother’s room. She cautions me:

  — Kenneth is watching television. Don’t torment him.

  — Promise.

  I open the door and enter my mother’s room. The maple table is laid for five. The huge room is warm, bright and cheerful. My son is nested in an armchair, his drawn-up legs splayed outwards against its sides. He is engrossed in cartoon adventures twitching on the screen before him. I note his intent gaze, his small mouth half-opened in an o of absorption, the beguiling aspect of a little boy just shedding the last traces of babyhood. Using a pet name his dawning manhood has not yet instructed him to repudiate, I say loudly:

  — Bodger? How are you?

  At the first sound he starts squirming resentfully and the face he turns briefly in my direction is screwed into reproach:

  — Aaaaaah! I wanna watch!

  — By all means. Good Lord, it would be a monstrous thing to come between a man and his telly.

  Saying which I stroll, as if absently, to a point immediately in front of the fluorescing screen. My son emits a yell of outrage and leaps like a landed fish. The protective voice of my aunt rings out:

  — What are you doing? Don’t torment the child! Ooo I’ll—

  I dodge hastily to one side as her threatening bulk looms at the door.

  — Just greeting him—

  I grin at her, mischievously innocent, glad to have donned my buffoon’s mantle so early in the evening. Now, having anticipated the charge of irresponsibility, I can’t be compelled to discuss adult matters in an adult way. Ken complains loudly:

  — He blocked me! He wouldn’t let me see—

  I interrupt him with a pained air:

  — Bodger! What crazed delusion is this? I assure you, Anny, I’m innocent as some virgin—forgive the indelicacy.

  My aunt gazes uncer
tainly from one to the other. However, she contents herself with a menacing gesture in my direction and returns to the kitchen. I murmur:

  — Ah well, think I’ll have a smoke.

  And again I drift between my son and his entertainment. He promptly emits a second howl of protest. Once again my aunt’s voice, this time tinged with real anger, smites my ear-drums. I don’t really want to goad her into one of her intense, if fleeting, spasms of fury. I hurriedly caution my son:

  — Shhh! Shut up—there, now watch.

  I vacate his sight-lines again. He is not readily appeasable but subsides slowly back into attention. I steal to the room door and close it silently. Then I turn ominously back to him:

  — So, we want to watch telly, do we? Don’t want to be bothered with the old man, don’t we? Complain to aunty, do we? Well, you spoiled little—

  As I bear menacingly down on him, he begins to wriggle and leap in his seat and shout for help. I pounce with a stabbing forefinger to the ribs. Then comes a swift upswing of his legs, toppling him round in the chair. A quick slap on his raised bottom and—giggles blend with his howls, so that by the time Anny once more stands angrily in the doorway, he is trapped between tears and laughter. I am conscious of a faint throb of relief, at this confirmation that I can still disperse his reserve by romping with him. It is nearly two years now since he unexpectedly asked me:

  — Daddy, when are you going to live with us again?

  I answered negligently.

  — No idea. Soon probably.

  He never repeated the question. But there is ambivalence in his manner. Oh yes, he’s well aware that dad, qua dad, is a bit of a write-off.

  I pour myself a whisky and soda and then stand leaning on the marble mantlepiece, gazing thoughtfully down at the electronic villager I initiated seven years ago.

  Biology and Sociology

  I grabbed your handbag and tore it open.

  Lemon sunlight bathed the street. The scent of summer overwhelmed the smell of cars. Lofty trees caressed the sky’s belly. A crease of pleasure rippled over Hampstead Hill. I grabbed your handbag, tore it open and extracted a pink, plastic case. Swiftly I inserted this between thick, iron rungs of a street grating and then stamped it down into the sewer. You said dubiously:

  — Billy, are you sure?

  — No. How can one be sure? How can one ever be sure? I’m not sure—but I’m glad. Aren’t you?

  — Yes!

  Your body shivered like a child’s at a promised treat. Your face shone. You always showed more pleasure at my mere response to your fragrant charm than courtesans to gifts of castles. We walked on, leaving the contraceptive diaphragm to swirl about beneath London. I said:

  — We ought to have one. You want to have one, don’t you?

  — If you do.

  — I want us to have a baby. We’re not that old but we’re not that young either. It’s about time. God knows how I’ll support it. I hate you having to work.

  — Billy! I don’t mind.

  Only seven years ago but, in retrospect, we walk in another world. How snug is the past, how secure! No comets of negative matter hurtle towards our solar system—in the past. No wars break out there and even if they do, the gashed body of the race ultimately rises above them. It is the present which is terrible, the breasting wave. The next second may sweep us all, and all our history, over some cliff of time into destruction in alien dimensions.

  The old Yorkshireman sighed at your fertility and pushed us down the hill. There we found a small modern flat but mice and fleas riddled its flooring. A duplicator clattered beneath us throughout the day and at night the ghost of the sad girl who had murdered herself in that pleasant flat stole up the carpeted stairs. She may have been inhibited from visual manifestation by the fact that only one of us believed in her—although after they took you away I sometimes paused and listened in the night.

  The winter was severe and one white day avid bohemians from all over London converged on the three buckets of steaming punch we had prepared. A turbulent Finn, in a frenzy of lust, raced three girls in succession into the bedroom, from which each emerged looking dazed but gratified. However, even the maidens who escaped the Finn’s ardour, and the men too, seemed to enjoy themselves. It was the best party we ever gave, a warm cave in a glacial London.

  Then the heavy spring began.

  Ken became doubly visible, both in the slight bulge of your belly and in the spikes on your blood pressure chart. The clinic began to isolate you for special observation. Your pressure had to be checked weekly, then twice weekly, then:

  — Billy! They want me to go into hospital!

  I gazed appreciatively at your quivering chin, your face drawn down in total misery. I adored your misery, the child’s unselfconsciousness with which you wept. I said gently:

  — Darling.

  You fell into my arms and streamed noisy tears. I comforted you.

  Your pressure dipped again and the clinic guardedly left you at home. But the word ‘toxaemia’ had entered our lives. I consulted medical textbooks. It seemed the baby was the culprit. Our future child was setting up a toxic reaction that imperilled your kidneys and threatened your general health. No one had yet ascertained the origin of the incompatibility which, in rare cases, caused one’s own offspring to poison one’s blood. But until recently surgically-induced abortion had been the prescribed treatment.

  And wouldn’t that be best!

  I read with dismay the description of pre-eclampsia which could usher in, with great rapidity, the convulsions of eclampsia which often had a fatal termination. Wouldn’t it be best, safest, to sacrifice the present incumbent of your womb and start again? Toxaemia in one pregnancy by no means guaranteed it in the next—though it increased the probability.

  Your pressure rose again and they summoned you. I took you, trembling and wretched, to the maternity home and installed you in the ward. Then I consulted the houseman. He said that deep and prolonged sedation could save the child and continual monitoring would enable them to act swiftly if your pressure shot above the danger point.

  So you went away from me and we didn’t really meet again for months. I visited you daily and saw your swelling form under the blankets and you rolled your head towards me and sometimes your hand came fumbling across the bedclothes to mine. Actually they timed the doses so that you were most rational at visiting times and often we were able to chat gently, if vaguely, but your brain was swimming in chloral hydrate and you were never ‘all there’.

  Summer began to rage.

  The equator had kinked and a loop had snagged London. The city bleached white and the sun burned the clothes off girls’ backs. Heat rained from the uncanny blue. The grass parched. A double row of eggs with limbs gasped in your stifling ward and, modesty dissolved in Fahrenheit, continued to mope prostrate above the sheets in no more than diaphanous nylon when we husbands shuffled dripping in at visiting times.

  Night after night, after seeing you, I blinked out of the maternity home into sub-tropical glare. I clambered into my ancient, straight-backed Ford and rattled away to The George or The Prince of Wales or some other pub, dreaming of willing girls.

  I saw them everywhere, lithe, promiscuous and glorious. Some I had met. They had been to our flat, after pubs, with moody Irish boy-friends who tortured them. We had been to parties in their deceived husbands’ studios or in the amusing flats they shared with two air hostesses and a radiologist. They were everywhere and smiled joyously to see me. And I took their hands fondly or circled them fervently round the waist and always, just as my exquisite lust was knotting itself into some unmistakable proposal for having drinks together, or a meal, or going driving or—they gazed intently into my eyes and asked about you. Were you all right? When would you be out? They thought you were marvellous. Their voices, their expressions, the melting gleam in their uterine eyes said:

  — I know you two only live for each other.

  And, fuming coward, I struggled in the trap of
our legendary devotion, unable to menace the touching image and declare my fermenting desire. I nodded sadly but hopefully, gave the latest medical bulletin and reeled on to the next such encounter.

  How could I? With you lying there, a drugged mass on a sheet of clammy red rubber, a mere incubator of hot flesh, sustaining the long, medicated gestation in order to present me with temporal succession—how could I? Try to date another girl, compliment and caress another girl, be seen in these gossip-loving streets with another girl, make love to smother girl while you were making, out of our love, another life?

  But how could I not!

  This was last chance filling station! The desert was ahead! Our union alone had moated me pretty securely in fidelity. How would I ever worm out through the added fortifications of fatherhood? Hadn’t I originally promised that I would love you but not be faithful to you? Shouldn’t I keep my promises? If I couldn’t achieve adultery now, with the guard temporarily disabled, how would I ever manage it when it was doubled?

  I plunged a quarter of a mile into the earth where the Genius of Temptation packed half the typists in London close about me. They wore nothing but a film of dyed fabric and the Genius, in his malign ingenuity, set the snakey red train swaying voluptuously. Hip jammed into my groin, breasts nuzzling my shoulders, buttocks, legs, arms, bellies crating me softly, I rocked shuddering into town and shuddering back in the evenings. A spectre, thinned by the immense counter-stresses of guilt and desire, I crept again into the ward to visit you and found there another spectre, but one etherialized by the sufferings of love.

  Then it happened.

  A crane of necessity hoisted me dripping but still technically chaste from the tepid pool of desire.